Dynamics 365 Business Central: loading data in custom tables

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Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC) is growing in popularity in these months and when a customer starts to move its business to the new SaaS platform, the first requested step is to move also their data.

Unfortunately nowadays Dynamics 365 Business Central does not have an automatic tool for data migration from an on-premise NAV (I think this is a task that Microsoft should start thinking…), so the recommended way to migrate customer’s data to D365BC is to use Configuration Packages.

I’ve see in these days that many partners and customers had problems on loading data into custom tables (added by extensions). It seems that, when you try to select a custom table, you receive the following error:

I’ve checked the problem by adding a custom table (50100) with an extension and what I’ve found is that this error occours only in Configuration Worksheet page. If you try to select your custom table in Configuration Worksheet, you receive the error in the previous picture:

If instead you go to Configuration Packages, you can select your custom table without problems:

and obviously you can see all the fields on it:

Microsoft knows this problem and it will be surely fixed. For the moment, for your custom tables (added from extensions) use Configuration Packages for loading data into them.

P.S. In my opinion Configuration Packages are a great tool but you need to carefully evaluate if this is the best method for loading data into D365BC. If you need to load tons of records in a D365BC table, sometimes using Configuration Packages (that relies on Excel files) could be not the best way to do (the client could become unresponsive and drop the connection). In these cases, I think that loading data via WS or APIs is much better (yes, this is not a bult-in tool and you need to write code, but this is another story 😉 ).